New Version of Apple’s App Store Rules Prohibits Cryptocurrency Mining

After Facebook, Twitter and Google, now it’s Apple imposing ban on cryptocurrency mining on iPhone and iPad. It has clearly mentioned in its newly section on cryptocurrency in its guidelines page on App Store that apply to macOS, watchOS, iOS and tvOS app.

Apple, the tech giant has updated its new restriction on the use of cryptocurrencies on iPhones and iPads. The developer guideline has clearly mentioned that it is explicitly ban “mining” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

The Apple guidelines read on its website;

“Apps, including any third party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining”.

The goal of the company is to protect users’ battery life and avoid “unnecessary strain on devices resources”. However, it is not likely that someone could easily mine bitcoin on iPhone or iPad by own for the reason that the amount of energy and computing power it takes. The guidelines about hardware compatibility elaborated that the app design must use the power efficiently. As such, there must not be rapidly drain battery, excessive heat, or put unnecessary strain on device resources.

The Tech Giant, Apple

The new policy of Apple sees to go beyond obviously offensive cases of tricky cryptocurrency mining. Therefore, guidelines ban any on-device mining if the users intentionally use an app to mine crypto assets.

Moreover, often crypto mining is essentially done highly powered computer systems. In order to trade bitcoin, transactions need to be verified by the complex math equations and then will be added in distributed ledger. Therefore, by the solving the complex math equations miner receives the bitcoin.

Nonetheless, the new restrictions of Apple are applicable to the all apps within the App Store, Macs and jailbroken iPhones. As to suggest, without a solid GPU, mining in Apple devices is not surely cost-effective to begin with.

Apple and Cryptocurrency Scams

Many a time cryptocurrency has encountered with App Store in various ways. However, Apple delisted Coinbase and other crypto related app from App Store in 2013 and 2014, as an “unresolved issue”. But then in 2017, that resulted in set of developer guidelines and the apps later returned. Thus Coinbase was the 1st app available in the app store.

Another app, Calender 2 was suspected in using customer computers for mining the cryptocurrency Monero. In return the users were receiving free access to premium features but a bug caused the miner to run indefinitely.

Earlier in 2018, the Apple cofounder Steve Woznaik, lost bitcoin worth of $75000 by hacker. A few days later, Wozniak has sold all his bitcoin and said, “he does not want to be one of the people who just watch the number”.

Having bought the coin in June when it was priced at $700 each means he has already made some profit out of it. He wanted to experiment with it and sold last fall.

“When it shot up high, I said I don’t want to be one of those people who watches and watches it and cares about the number. I don’t want that kind of care in my life,” Wozniak said in a Q&A with marketing guru and author Seth Godin”.

Recently, Steve Woznaik endorses Bitcoin and said,

“Wozniak said, I buy into what Jack Dorsey says, not that I necessarily believe it’s going to happen. But because I want it to be that way, that is so pure thinking”.

For him, “Bitcoin is something natural and nature is more important than all our human conventions”. He sees a strong potential in Bitcoin and said all other virtual currencies tend to give up some of the aspects of Bitcoin.